I Burnt Too Many Bridges

Recently I saw a post from a brazillian copywriter called Rafael Censon, it was a really interesting piece of content in which he explained about a type of person called "Accumulator".

One example of behavior of an accumulator is not wanting to rely on other people, and to verticalize solutions on his own instead.

But what really caught my attention were two characteristcs listed in the end of the publication. And they were even described as disadvantages.

First, this kind of person needs a lot of data before acting. Second, this kind of person needs safety.

The point of this text is that I saw myself in these characteristcs. I agree that I tend to need a lot of data before acting, and I recognize myself as someone who needs a lot of certainty before taking action. But why?

Because in the past I made a LOT of mistakes caused by my own impulsive actions, and I decided to reflect on that for a bit.

I have a lot of ideas (this website was one of them), every day I come up with new ideas, like projects I could code, content that I could create, plugins that I could make, SaaS that I could bring to the world...

But almost nothing has the chance to take form because, as soon as I have an idea, I start seing all of its problems and the reasons that it would not work, everything that could go wrong, all the effort that it would take and, I don't know, it seems as an uncertain outcome for too much work, or no outcome at all.

By thinking that the outcome is not worth it, I give up.

I also like to have a lot of control on what I do. I get stressed when an error appears and I can't even debbug it because I can't find the information about it.

So if a client has a problem on his site and I don't know what is happening, I feel the urge to rebuild the entire project in code instead of using something like Wordpress because errors like this get out of my control.

These are things that I don't know how to fix. Things that I still don't have the knowledge to solve or things that I don't understand what is actually wrong, sometimes I don't know how to replicate the error and that makes me annoyed.

Another example that I can provide is about the time that I worked in an agency, as the person responsible for getting data from the media buying campaigns and organize it in a dashboard. There were tools that could do this process automatically, but on my mind it was a lot better to learn how to do that on my own than paying an expensive tool.

But I did not realize at the time that all the hours that I would waste and how it was more expensive than paying something already created. As at the time I did not know a thing about coding.

This "need to know how" to do my work better, instead of subscribing to a tool that could automate the process was what ended up taking me to programming. I started learning low-code to do the repetitite tasks, I learned about APIs and got my first steps in real code.

Another thing that makes me feel like an accumulator is that I spend too much time studying before making a decision.

If I want to buy an online course I will analyze if it fits my long term plans, the cost (even if I don't have the money for it). If I want to make a coding project I need to think a lot about it for, like, months before making the decision to start (I could have created this wesite a lot sooner).

I was not even like this some years ago. I learned to behave like this because I burnt too many bridges.

I got out of my parents house before having a job and with no money, I changed my college course from Linguistiscs and Literature to Economics too soon and ended up losing my scholarship. Having to pay for college turned into debt. After I started making money online I moved to a bigger city and my living expenses got a lot higher, with no emergency funds.

All of these actions were mistakes. And all of these actions made me into someone that has to think too much before taking action.

That's why I decided to create something. That's why I am writing this in a language that I don't even master.

I burnt too many bridges and this year I felt as if I had nowhere to go anymore.

Now I started making new ones. Brick by brick.